


Sugar House

by merryghoul



Series: Spook Me Ficathon [5]
Category: Doctor Who (1963), Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Alien Abduction, F/M, Horses, Human Experimentation, Mad Science, Magic, Robbery, Sleep Deprivation, Stabbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:42:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2506538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryghoul/pseuds/merryghoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A woman helps an injured Ichabod after a battle, but she intends to do something else to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugar House

**Author's Note:**

> [](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**fic_promptly**](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/): ["Any, any, (562): You came running into my room at 4 in the morning yelling "SANCTUARY!" and flung yourself into bed."](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/188733.html?thread=8166717#cmt8166717)
> 
> [](http://spook-me.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://spook-me.dreamwidth.org/) **spook_me** : mad scientist

During what these "historians" have now entitled as the Battle of Long Island, a Hessian bayoneted me in my stomach.  I remember collapsing in the middle of the road.  I thought I was going to die.  I thought I would never see my Katrina again.

Everything changed when a woman with a cart stopped near me.  I cried out for help as much as I could.

The woman stopped her cart.  She ran by my side with a flask of whiskey in her hand.  In my time, we did not have the medicines made at your modern day pharmacies (as you Americans call them) to cure our ills.  Everything could be made better by alcohol.  I believe Katrina gave me a lot of her spells disguised as alcoholic cures, now that I think about it   "Good sir, are you injured?"  The woman, at first, sounded congenial.

"I am injured.  A Hessian stabbed me."

"I have a hospital in Manhattan.  I'll take you there."

There were not a lot of hospitals I knew of in Manhattan that were run by women at that time.  I thought the notion was absurd, but I didn't question the woman.  "Thank you, madam."

"You should drink this to numb the pain."

I drank as much whiskey as I could drink.  To my surprise, after a few gulps, I was out cold.  I suppose the woman drugged me with another substance that was stronger than the whiskey she gave me.  I do remember the woman whispering one thing to me as my eyes started to fall: "Carnivore."  I was, and still am, perplexed by what the woman meant.  I am technically an omnivore, not a carnivore.  Not everything I have eaten or will eat has meat in it.  

 

I woke up in what I thought was a dream.  But I felt cold metal on the exposed parts of my skin; I knew this wasn't a dream.

The woman took me to a sugar house.  The sugar house looked like the other Manhattan sugar houses that were abandoned prior to the War of Independence.  Most of those sugar houses were converted to house prisoners of war during the War.  But this woman's sugar house was different.  I remember seeing metal, tubes and bright lights everywhere.  The woman pinned my arms and legs down to the aforementioned metal table.  I would not see a similar sight until after I woke up several years later from my grave, when one of my adventures led me to enter a hospital.  

The woman healed me.  My clothes were still bloody and ripped, but the stab wound in my abdomen disappeared.  I felt no pain.  I stopped bleeding.  I am not sure how she did it, but I am convinced the woman is not of this world. 

I felt something strangling me. I looked down as much as I could.  I found the culprit within a matter of seconds: a suction cup attached to a tube on the side of my neck.  I do not know what the tube collected, but it was collecting something.  Judging by the other prisoners the woman kept in her sugar house, whatever the woman pulled out of her prisoners was for some nefarious purpose. 

The woman who brought me to the sugar house was not in my room.  I knew I needed to make my escape.

I made my hands as small as I could make them.  Little by little I moved my hands from my restraints.  My forearms and legs were still pinned to the table.

In my coat, I kept a skeleton key at all times in case I needed to sneak in and out of any sort of building.  I pulled out my skeleton key, which Katrina sewed into one of my pockets.  I inched with my right hand and managed to find the hole near the locking mechanism of the upper left arm restraint.  I released my left arm from the restraint and did the same thing with my right.  Finally, I pulled the suction cup from my neck, allowing myself to breathe again.  I released my legs from their restraints and stood up. 

I used my skeleton key to get out of my cell.  Then I walked around the sugar house.  It was a house of horrors.  I heard growling and yelling from several of the prisoners.  One prisoner threw things around in his cell.  Another prisoner charged against her door when she heard me coming.  I recoiled when she came at me. 

I noticed two things about these prisoners.  One, they were sleep deprived.  I am certain they were all on the verge of death.  Two, they all had a big red spot on their necks.  I assume they went through the procedure the woman tried to conduct on me.

Near the back of the sugar house, I noticed the woman who rescued me from the road changed out of her dress.  She wore some sort of a jacket and trousers.  They were akin to your modern day pants than my modern day trousers.  It was not common to see women in pants in my day.  I found the revelation startling. 

As I walked away from the woman, I ran into the door of one of the woman's captives.  The woman heard me hitting the door and turned to me.  "How did you get out?" she asked me.  "You humans all react the same way to alcohol.  I gave you enough alcohol to knock you out for hours!"

"I guess I am not like the other people you have successfully managed to capture here."

"I guess I'll have to use these useless specimens after all."

The woman pulled a lever near the wall she stood at.  The lever opened all of the sugar house's cells.

"After him.  Treat him like you do your fellow carnivores."

The sleep-deprived people started running after me, so I ran and ducked as they threw things at me.  Of course, not all of the sleep-deprived people paid attention to me.   A couple of the people started wrecking the room the woman put me in earlier.  Another person walked to the woman, picked her up by her jacket, and took her into a room close to where I found her.  The last thing I heard from the woman was "Put me down, you idiot!"  I am not sure if the woman is alive or not, but I have not seen or heard from her ever since. 

I unlocked the sugar house's front door and ran out.  The sleep-deprived people still chasing me followed. 

Nearby the sugar house was a white horse.  I am certain it belonged to some British Army officer.  But I needed the horse to escape the sleep-deprived people, so I untied the horse and rode it up to Sleepy Hollow. 

The white horse was fast, but to my astonishment, the sleep-deprived people kept following me.  It was as if the woman sucked out all the fear and self-consciousness these people had before they were kidnapped by this woman.  I sent my pursuers in various directions when we left New York.  I ran around a tree and one of the sleep-deprived people ran into it.  Another fell into the road after tripping.  The last few people I led through a shallow stream.  My horse was able to cross the stream with ease.  The sleep-deprived people, on the other hand, l tripped and fell in the water.

I am sad to report that none of the people the woman kidnapped survived.  One of the newspapers at the time, _The New-York Packet,_ reported a series of mysterious deaths from the sugar house to halfway up to Sleepy Hollow a day later.  I am certain they all died of sleep deprivation.

I rode the horse to my home in Sleepy Hollow.  I let the horse go in the wood.  The horse most likely never saw his master again. 

I entered my home at four in the morning.  I yelled "Sanctuary!" at the top of my lungs.  Then I fell into my bed. 

Katrina rolled out of bed to see me flop into it.  "Ichabod, are you all right?  I thought you had died in that battle."

"No.  I just escaped from a living nightmare.  If I told you what I have just been through, you would not believe me.  It was not of this world."

"What happened to your neck?"

"A woman tried to extract something out of my body.  It left this scar."

"I'll be right back, my love."

Katrina went into our kitchen and grabbed me more whiskey.  She put some of it to my lips.  Unlike the woman who healed me and tried to kill me, I knew the whiskey Katrina gave me wasn't laced with another chemical ingredient.  Katrina's lips moved without a sound as she gave me the whiskey.  I believe she cast a sleeping spell on me, but I did not realize it at that time.  I thought she was praying to make sure I was going to be alive the next day.  In any case, I went to sleep after I drank some whiskey.

The next day, the red patch on my neck was gone.  In retrospect, I am sure Katrina cast a spell on me to remove the mark and any pain I felt. 

I have never told this story to anyone except to you.  If I told it back in 1776, I would have been confined somewhere for life.  But now that I have discovered that my life as a Witness is far from anyone's normal life, I have learned even the most ludicrous of stories may have a hint of truth to them.

Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to see if I can navigate what you call the "internet."  I am hoping to avoid any maidens in what you call "cyberspace."  I am sure Katrina would not approve of these maidens flirting with me.


End file.
